Earned inequalities?

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class...

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all...
.....
The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

I want to use the above piece and its headline question to explore an interesting feature - or so it strikes me anyway - of inequality comparisons of this kind. Typically, two or more groups of people will be distinguished by some identity marker and then a difference noted in their material holdings or their average income or some such. The groups may be distiguished, as here, in terms of colour, or of ethnic identity, or religion, or gender, or language or some other marker; but in any case the material differential found, if there is one and if it is of any considerable size, is assumed to expose an unfairness unless that differential can be explained in another way, a way which relates it to individual desert.

Generally it is thought not to be explicable by reference to individual desert, or not to be entirely or sufficiently explicable in terms of individual desert, since how could it be that, across relatively large population groups, there is some systematically higher level of merit correlated with group identity? We tend not to think of merit - merit for what people have done, for how they have arranged their priorities or their lives - as uniformly correlated with colour, race, gender and so forth. There are exceptions to this. If some motivational difference can be found between groups that is attributable to differences in acculturation, then uneven achievements may be traceable to differences in degree of effort or the differing ways in which effort has been invested. But, unless there is specific evidence of that sort, when we find a big differential we think it reasonable to suppose that the group which is on the wrong end of it has been unfairly held back.

We tend to think, further, that the resulting material difference separating the groups in question describes, in itself, a situation of unequal advantage. After all, unless the inequality of result were one of relative advantage and disadvantage, why should there be a need to focus on it at all as a possible subject of social criticism? So the individuals in group H are on average n times richer than the individuals in group R - what's the big deal? If this is merely a difference rather than an inequality in life-advantages, in benefits and disbenefits, we could just shrug it aside - as we might shrug aside the fact that group H lives in Acetown-in-the-Sun whereas group R lives in Beautsville-on-the-Green; or shrug aside the fact that these people call their places of worship mosques, and these people call theirs synagogues, and these again, churches.

Now, imagine a newspaper column headed by the question, 'why are the richest x per cent of people in this country n times richer than the poorest x per cent?' I'm not saying one can't imagine the question being asked. It might be asked with the burden of it being 'why n times as opposed to only n/3 times richer, as in Pinkland, or only n/100 times richer as in the Gulp States?' But insofar as the question at the beginning of this post easily yields the further question (and further thought) 'why are whites any richer than blacks in the US? ', so equally here one might imagine the question about richest and poorest leading on to this one 'why are the richest x per cent of people in this country any richer than the poorest x per cent?' And that sounds silly. It sounds a bit like asking 'why are the tall people in this country any taller than the short people?' The richest are richer than the poorest because rich and poor is what, respectively, the two groups are.

And yet if significant differentials of wealth and/or income that correlate with colour or gender are prima facie signals of possible unfairness, why not also significant differentials between rich and poor? We suspect that differentials of the former sort are not purely on account of merit but reflect unfair advantages and obstacles; and we have just as much reason to suspect the same with differentials between rich and poor, since we already know, from the way we think about wealth and poverty as outcomes, that they are about relative advantage and disadvantage. It is implausible (to say no more than this) that all differentials between rich and poor are earned ones, are deserved.

So why is this inequality different from other inequalities? Just thinking aloud here.